/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 * 
 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 * 
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
using System;

namespace org.apache.commons.codec
{

    /**
     * <p>Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders.
     * This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}.  All
     * Decoders implement this common generic interface.</p>
     * 
     * <p>Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder 
     * implementation in the codec package.</p>
     * 
     * <p>One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.</p>
     * 
     * @author Apache Software Foundation
     * @version $Id: Decoder.java 797690 2009-07-24 23:28:35Z ggregory $
     */
    public interface Decoder
    {

        /**
         * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded"
         * Object.  Note that the implementation of this
         * interface will try to cast the Object parameter
         * to the specific type expected by a particular Decoder
         * implementation.  If a {@link ClassCastException} occurs
         * this decode method will throw a DecoderException.
         * 
         * @param pObject an object to "decode"
         * 
         * @return a 'decoded" object
         * 
         * @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can
         * be thrown for any number of reasons.  Some good
         * candidates are that the parameter passed to this
         * method is null, a param cannot be cast to the
         * appropriate type for a specific encoder.
         */
        Object decode(Object pObject);// throws DecoderException;
    }
}
